Re: Switch of GNOME tarball compression format: tar.xz only

[Olav Vitters <olav vitters nl>]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 02:03:23PM +0000, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > For maintainers:
> >  - ftpadmin script will automatically handle conversion of compression
> >   formats
> 
> Will this cause excessive load on the server, if everyone is uploading
> .tar.bz2 or .tar.gz, and then we have to convert to .xz?  I haven't
> run any real benchmarks, but the literature I can find shows that
> creating the .xz files uses gobs of memory, and takes quite a bit
> longer than either .gz or .bz2 files.

It is not ideal, but hope that the maintainer will notice and convert.
But does not matter too much. We use the standard xz compression method;
uses about 100MB of memory and should take less than a minute to
compress. It is a pretty good tradeoff between saved space and
time+memory it takes to compress.

> >  - it would still be nice if 'make dist' was changed to create a .tar.xz
> >   file, using:
> >     AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11 no-dist-gzip dist-xz])
> 
> I suppose this pushes it off on maintainers, eliminating the problems
> on the server.  I'm not sure if the time involved is still an issue
> once this work is distributed, though.  Knowing you, Olav, you've
> already thought of this and it's not a problem, but I figured I should
> throw it out there anyway.  Thanks,

The standard xz compression option is not too bad. And it saves a bit of
space, so time spent on compressing can be saved on the upload. All
depends on your CPU, upload bandwidth and if the maintainer cares. Also,
'make dist' usually takes quite a bit of time anyway.
-- 
Regards,
Olav